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3p Contributor: Tina Casey

Tina is a career public information specialist and former Deputy Director of Public Affairs of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and author of books and articles on recycling and other conservation themes. She writes frequently on sustainable tech issues for Triple Pundit and other websites, with a focus on military, government and corporate sustainability, and she is currently Deputy Director of Public Information for the County of Union, New Jersey. Follow Tina on twitter, @TinaMCasey https://twitter.com/#!/TinaMCasey.

Recent Articles

California has just joined the Obama administration’s new public-private partnership H2 USA, and that should go a long way towards helping fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) secure a place in the electric vehicle market of the future.

H2 USA was created last year in order to kickstart the FCEV market, which right now faces a classic chicken-and-egg problem. FCEVs promise greater range and flexibility than their lithium-ion battery cousins, but very few public FCEV refueling opportunities exist right now (that’s the chicken), and the private sector is reluctant to start building them until more FCEVs are on the road (that’s the egg).

Given California’s history of leveraging its huge auto market in support of new clean technology, it looks like the logjam is about to break.

The food industry organization Food Waste Reduction Alliance (FWRA) has just released a new toolkit for improving the bottom line by reducing food waste, and one major theme to emerge from those strategies is the nexus of food waste and energy. That relationship is most clearly evident in the waste disposal area, since food scraps are generally wet and heavy, leading to high transportation and landfill costs.

The food waste-energy nexus is also at work more subtly throughout the new toolkit. Think of the relationship between food waste and energy as a corollary to the water-energy nexus, and you can see how this massive challenge can be leveraged as a positive bottom line benefit that sets off a ripple effect through civic and environmental issues as well.

Incumbent Republican Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania has been campaigning for re-election on a platform that touts the 200,000 jobs created through his support for natural gas fracking, but the Pennsylvania fracking boom is not all that it’s cracked up to be. A provocative article newly published in The National Journal casts some serious doubts upon Corbett’s representation of the number of jobs created by fracking, an unconventional method of extracting natural gas from shale formations.

The National Journal makes a good case that the fracking industry accounts for less than 1 percent of current Pennsylvania job creation, which gets us to thinking that the number of jobs actually created by the Pennsylvania fracking industry is offset by the jobs at risk in the state’s rich and varied historical tourism, recreation and agricultural sectors — all of which are threatened by fracking operations.

When you put coal and carbon capture together with TTC, the most you can say about Shell is that the energy company is using the declaration more as publicity leverage for its existing oil and gas operations, rather than a meaningful step toward transitioning its business model into renewable sources. So, let’s take a closer look at TTC and the answers to those frequently asked questions (FAQs).

A new finding from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) demonstrates yet again how the flexibility and wide-ranging applicability of solar power provides it with advantages that are impossible to achieve with fossil forms of energy. NTU’s breakthrough is a new solar cell material that could also be used to make the now-ubiquitous touch screens for electronic devices, information kiosks and many other display forms.

The integrated solar cell/touch screen concept parallels the emergence of building-integrated solar cells, as well as solar cells that can be incorporated into fabrics and other wearable or portable items.

In addition to the potential energy cost savings related to consumer products, NTU’s new solar cell material could also provide businesses with a low-emission platform for colorful lighting displays, especially when combined with a storage system that enables night-time use.

With new EPA regulations for coal-fired power plants looming ahead, the coal and utilities industries have issued sharp warnings about the impact of another “war on coal.” The argument goes that the cost of installing pollution-scrubbing equipment, and/or shutting down outdated coal-fired power plants, is passed directly along to the consumer in the form of higher rates. The U.S. economy also feels the impact, so the argument goes, in terms of higher business costs, lost employment opportunities and a competitive advantage for coal-using companies overseas.

However, given the past record of accuracy for those warnings, it looks like a bad case of déjà vu all over again. According to a history of similar warnings about coal regulation compiled by the Center for American Progress (CAP), those predictions fail to account for the positive impact of innovation, as well as the economic counterbalance of improved public health.

Meanwhile, within the broader issue of U.S. infrastructure, CAP draws out an important point: In the coming years, the main driver of utility rates will not be the power plants or the fuel they use, it will be the urgent need to overhaul the nation’s aging, badly outdated electricity distribution and transmission grid.

When the EPA releases a research report claiming that LEED-certified buildings don’t perform as well as their non-certified counterparts, that’s bound to turn heads in at least some sectors of the blogosphere so consider this mission accomplished. Last Friday, a group called the Environmental Policy Alliance (EPA, what else?) released a bombshell report claiming that LEED (Leadership in Environmental Engineering and Design) certified buildings “actually use more energy than uncertified buildings.” The report has been making waves around the tubes all week long.

That’s all well and good if you’re only interested in culling information from their press release. However, if you are interested in whether the Environmental Policy Alliance is an organization with a solid track record in research or if it’s just another one of those PR efforts masquerading as a think tank, you can follow the links to their website and your answers are right there.

The tubes have been buzzing over a new report announcing that 91 Illinois communities now get 100 percent of their electricity from renewable sources, but that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg. According to the report, “Leading from the Middle,” more than 500 other communities in the state have signed on to the same community choice program that the “clean 91″ have used, and several have already begun using it to improve their electricity footprint.

Within that larger group is Chicago, which is highlighted in the report. Though it still relies heavily on natural gas, Chicago has already used community choice to get from 40 percent coal down to zero in practically the blink of an eye.

As for how that is possible, let’s take a remark by Chicago’s chief sustainability officer, Karen Weigert, who sums it all up in “Leading from the Middle” with this comment: “[Electricity] is a market, and when you ask a market for something, they can provide it.”

How’s this for timing: Just a few weeks in advance of a special Triple Pundit series on sustainable fisheries, last Friday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a strongly–and we mean strongly–worded announcement that it will use its authority under the Clean Water Act to to protect the sockeye salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, Alaska, which just happens to be the largest sockeye fishery in the entire world.

Triple Pundit took note of the EPA announcement earlier this week (here’s that article), and it’s worth revisiting the topic to make a point about the growing tension between renewable and non-renewable resources in an increasingly globalized economy.

Last week, Los Angeles joined the growing list of cities and towns banning, at least temporarily, gas and oil fracking within their borders. The main concerns are over public health and water resource preservation, but economic impacts and property values also come into play. The news comes on the heels of yet another article in the mainstream press that paints a picture of the fracking industry as a swelling bubble that will make a loud and messy noise when it pops.

Part of the reason why the fracking industry is so bloated right now is something that our friends over at Fuel Fix have dubbed the “Red Queen” effect, after the fictional Lewis Carroll character, so let’s take a look at the Los Angeles decision in that context.

Earlier this month, the building analytics company WegoWise launched a blog that provides the public with useful nuggets of data about building efficiency and water use, gleaned from the staggering amount of information it collects from scores of utility companies around the country, among other sources. The new blog, data.wegowise.com, focuses on concisely presented, interactive images that enable readers to get a visual grasp-at-a-glance of the essential elements before delving into the details.

As a means of helping to convince property owners that energy efficiency improvements are an investment, not a cost, the new blog is especially timely for New York City. New regulations embodied in Local Law 84 require owners of thousands of buildings in New York to start recording and publicizing their energy and water consumption, and WegoWise has launched a new service designed to help them comply.

Barely three years ago, the Obama administration launched the SunShot Initiative, an ambitious effort to transform solar power from an exotic, expensive form of energy into a mainstream fuel that can compete on price with petroleum, coal, and natural gas. In the latest development for low-cost solar power, last week Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced that the program is already 60 percent of the way toward its goal of bringing the average price for a utility-scale solar power plant down to the target price of six cents per kilowatt-hour.

In raw numbers, that’s a steep slide from an average of 21 cents in 2010 to only 11 cents by the end of 2013. That’s now less than the average price of electricity in the U.S., which is about 12 cents per kWh, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The trend toward low-cost solar power is nowhere near at an end. The new announcement came with word of yet another SunShot initiative that will help bring the cost of solar power down even more in the coming years: A $25 million funding package for innovative technologies that focuses on manufacturing costs.

If you’ve never heard the phrase “hero crop” before, you will soon. Relatively new to the lexicon, hero crop refers to sustainable crops that fulfill social benefit goals for the communities that grow them. That will include tea, if the global non-profit organization Forum for the Future has anything to say about it.

Forum for the Future has just launched a new initiative called “The Future of Tea – A Hero Crop for 2030″ with several of the seven companies responsible for 90 percent of the global tea market (yes, only seven). The group encompasses at least three brands familiar to U.S. tea drinkers: Lipton (parent company Unilever), Tetley (parent company Tata Global Beverages), and Twinings. A fourth company, Finlays, is a leading tea trader, manufacturer, and processor among other diverse activities including coffee, produce, flowers, rubber, and forestry products.

The longtime sustainable business advocacy organization Green America (formerly Co-op America) has just come out with a new report card that could help consumers identify banks that they want to do credit card business with, based on their record of investing — or not investing — in coal-fired power plants and coal mining.

The coal-free credit cards report is timely, given the three-in-a-row coal related disasters that recently polluted the Elk River and Kanawah Creek in West Virginia, and the Dan River in North Carolina, which have drawn national attention to the risks and impacts of coal mining.

Unfortunately, those three episodes are just the tip of a very dirty iceberg.

Citing a potential 40 percent gap between water resources and water needs by 2030, the U.K. based organization Carbon Trust has issued a new report highlighting water risk issues for business with the attention-getting pitch “adapt or die.” Though somewhat alarming, the turn of phrase is timely here in the U.S., where the West Virginia chemical spill in the Elk River and the North Carolina coal ash spill in the Dan River have dramatically illustrated the consequences of lax regulation and fossil fuel dependency.

Rather than dwelling on risks, though, the Carbon Trust report is all about solutions and opportunities, as you can gather by the title “Opportunities in a resource constrained world: How business is rising to the challenge.”

New York, NY: May 14 – May 16Sustainable Cosmetics Summit Taking place in New York City on 14-16th May, the Sustainable Cosmetics Summit will showcase major developments in green ingredients, distribution, social and customer impacts. Register here.

San Diego: Jun 1 – Jun 4Sustainable Brands 2015 Reinvent yourself in response to changing norms. The demand for brands to deliver purpose is soaring. Get a 20% discount with the code "NW3pSB15sd"Register here.

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